Uta Barth

Biography

Photographing exclusively in her own home, Uta Barth seeks to make viewers conscious of their own perceptual process in relationship to what they see in a gallery. “In most photographs the subject and the content are one and the same thing. My work is first and foremost about perception,” she explains. An early realization that using a camera lens changed how she saw things resulted in a visual acuity to the mundane and ephemeral. For instance, in her series “Ground” and “Field” (1992-98), Barth created images of blurry backgrounds by focusing her camera on empty foregrounds. In her recent three-part project “And to draw a bright white line with light” (2011), a ribbon of light streaming through a window ripples across a set of curtains, which Barth has drawn to manipulate the abstract forms cast through it’s openings. Barth was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012.